Game Details

While walking through an interstellar outpost midway through The Swapper, you come across a giant asteroid lodged into a series of steel girders and bathed in dotted lights. You might think it's a weird choice of interior decoration, made all the weirder by the all-caps message it soon beams into your brain. "The one called the Swapper: it manipulates minds by some method that is not persuasion or argument. Is it a weapon?"

By this point in the game, though, it would be weird if the asteroid didn't start spouting nonsense—and besides, this is the first time the voices in your head make even a little sense. This rock is plainly describing the game that contains it, which may seem quite familiar at this point. After all, The Swapper's brain-bending 2D puzzles, super-scientific yet non-violent gun, and cryptic sci-fi disaster setting will hardly turn the puzzle-platformer genre on its head.

But maybe the genre doesn't need upending. The Swapper is the latest game to make the most of a maturing genre by combining accessible smarts, meaty puzzles, and beautiful atmosphere. For a game all about duplicates, this one retains its own identity.

Looking inside the turtle shell

When it first appeared as an Independent Games Festival finalist in 2011, The Swapper impressed judges with its 2D twist on Portal-style puzzling. A hero uses a special gun to create duplicates of himself—up to five at a time—and transfers his consciousness into them to deal with a variety of obstacles. Seems like a solid enough template to build a game around.

Two years later the game has evolved into a new form, one that takes its conceit of creating body duplicates to a much more literal level. As The Swapper progresses, it becomes obvious that its designers looked at the game's central mechanic and said, "Hey, cloning yourself and sending your soul all over the place is kind of a terrifying concept!"

Practically every element of the game's world drives this point home. Between puzzles, the hero finds diary entries in which scientists and engineers grapple with the ethics and hubris of such a creepy scientific advance. A semi-narrator seeks help while openly addressing the chaos that has since killed her comrades. A bunch of sentient asteroids, whose power has been drained to fuel your little puzzle-platforming romp, take occasional control of your brain to mourn their "species."

It's an interesting change from the gaming norm of ignoring or downplaying the magical realism inherent in their designs. In Super Mario Bros., for instance, it's just considered normal that a plumber has to jump on a turtle shell and then kick it into misshapen brown mushrooms. In modern pulse-pounders like Burnout, drivers pulverize their anonymous racecar foes with neither mercy nor remorse. The Swapper, on the other hand, is extremely aware of the oddity of its own premise and is all the better for it.

Pieces in a chess match

The clever story treatment wouldn't matter much if the puzzles didn't hold up their end of the bargain, of course. The crux of the game's challenge comes from restrictive glowing lights that block your gun's functions. Blue lights restrict the ability to generate a clone in a space while red lights restrict any swap requests. Purple conveniently does both.

Your main method of getting around these problems is to direct yourself and your clones toward trigger switches that can deactivate lights, open hatches, and do other useful things. The only problem is that for every step you take, your clones take the same step. Thus, the solution to each problem has to be carefully plotted out from beginning to end, keeping every step and trigger in mind as if they were pieces in a chess match that also happen to be tied together by a piece of twine.

Much like Portal's door-gun, The Swapper's clone-and-swap mechanic forces you to examine a puzzle-room and find a specific solution that, for the most part, can't be brute-forced into completion. The endearing process of furrowing your brow at a tricky room and then pumping a fist into the air after figuring out the solution should be familiar if you've played any recent games similar to Portal.

On the flip side, like Portal, The Swapper also has a brief shelf life. Other than a gravity-reverse trick added later in the game, you're stuck with the same old cloning and swapping. While the game doesn't overstay its welcome, it's hard not to wonder if a few other gimmicks could have resulted in some more tricky rooms.

Thankfully, you can still progress in The Swapper even if you skip a good number of the puzzles. That's probably a concession to the few super-difficult challenge rooms that require highly specific angles, clone placements, and other yank-your-hair-out frustrations to get through. Truth be told, I still haven't finished them all, and I need a brain break before going back for 100 percent.

The annoyances look gorgeous, at least. The space station's most desolate rooms explode with JJ Abrams-style blasts of blue and orange, while other sectors shine with glowing light projections and overgrown alien flora (too bad about the lip-balm blur overlaid over everything, though). The whole affair hums with ambient tones and piano plinks which set an appropriate mood of dread and awe as needed.

While the puzzles can occasionally stumble, worse is the game's insistence on unnecessary "Metroidvania"-style backtracking and mouse-and-keyboard controls. If this game saw a structural revision and found its way to tablets, it would probably qualify as a somewhat uneven must-play.

As it stands, The Swapper still delivers puzzle-platforming catnip—and a decent if slightly hackneyed plot that does a magnificent job of playing around with your efforts as a science-bending hero. Pick it up if you're a Steam game collector who doesn't mind trading $15 for about 4-6 hours of memorable conversations with asteroids.

The Good

Top-tier puzzle platforming

Gorgeously rendered sci-fi setting and story

Lovely pairing of gameplay and game world

The Bad

Prepare to hit your head against the wall for a few puzzles

You can't wipe the lip-balm blur off the screen

The Ugly

The game in no way benefits from a Metroidvania map

Verdict: Buy it if you're into niche puzzlers; try it at a friend's house if you're a novice.

23 Reader Comments

Ah, puzzle games. The idea for this one reminds me of a Flash-based one, Shift, back in my Kongregate days of proscratination. Definitely I would try this one.

I like seeing the indie gaming industry gaining notoriety on general media, with coverage of festivals and expositions on Internet and even TV, at least in Brazil. (I don't know about you people around the world, sorry.)Since the mainstream industry is heading towards money-making, graphical masterpieces, full of restrictions, making you spend money on new hardware and DLCs almost every year, and I swear to God I'm not generalizing the whole industry but being realistic on my own perspective, a "separated" industry gives the whole thing a fresh air of nostalgia, bringing back the days where games were meant to be fun, either would you spend an hour or a year to finish them.

Don't get it on Steam, guys! It's the same price at the dev's site, where he gets more of the money, and you get a DRM free download PLUS a Steam key anyways. The dev is selling via the Humble Store, where your new acquisition goes into the big download page of all your Humble Purchases. I have to say, Humble has a fantastic system going, lots of payment options, easy to get in, easy to download/torrent.

One downside of Humble is that they don't have a storefront for the individual (as in not-a-bundle) game titles, instead they provide a widget for developers to put on their game's homepage. There's a wiki to keep up on the goings on, I've discovered and bought several games because of that page. My most recent acquisition from there is Gunpoint, a title that was on WTF is almost a year ago. Man, I thought that game was stuck in limbo.

If your looking to buy the soundtrack for the game as well be sure to click the "Click here to buy the game and soundtrack together" link above the form on this page. Don't get tunnel vision like I did and have to turn around five minutes later and buy the soundtrack off of bandcamp separately for several dollars more.

Between puzzles, the hero finds diary entries in which scientists and engineers grapple with the ethics and hubris of such a creepy scientific advance.

Diary entries. Again. You're progressing through the game, everything is awesome, and then -wham-. Everything stops instantly and you are presented with a wall of text or some sort of spoken monologue. Then after the story has been forcefully inserted in your gameplay, you can get back to the game again. This was a necessary narrative technique for stuff like System Shock because of the limited technology at the time. Things have changed immensely since then, but we still find this heavyhanded technique in plenty of games.

I love story and narrative, but I'm kind of saddened that this least favorite technique is still popping up so often.

How does the soul-swapping mechanic work if all the clones move when you do? Does it only control which copy gets to make more clones? Or is there something else which only the "primary" you does?

The angles are very important, so it lets you switch to a clone that may have a better angle. Also, for example, if you're falling you can put and take over a new clone above you while the previous one dies (clones you aren't inhabiting can die, but the one you're in can't). Most importantly, you have to be in control of a clone to pick up the orbs.

After this review I picked up the game and played it for probably 8 hours this weekend. The puzzles are fantastic so far, and I don't think I'm all the way through.

Between puzzles, the hero finds diary entries in which scientists and engineers grapple with the ethics and hubris of such a creepy scientific advance.

Diary entries. Again. You're progressing through the game, everything is awesome, and then -wham-. Everything stops instantly and you are presented with a wall of text or some sort of spoken monologue. Then after the story has been forcefully inserted in your gameplay, you can get back to the game again. This was a necessary narrative technique for stuff like System Shock because of the limited technology at the time. Things have changed immensely since then, but we still find this heavyhanded technique in plenty of games.

I love story and narrative, but I'm kind of saddened that this least favorite technique is still popping up so often.

You don't have to use any of the "memory consoles", most of the texts are short and are interesting, the rest is just an overlay while walking past certain objects, nothing prevents you from just playing on. And I quite like that, way more then forced cutscenes and that stuff, because you can choose to experience the story or just play the puzzles.

Really like the game, good puzzles and the Artstyle and atmosphere are just incredible, it really feels a bit creepy.

Just beware the game has some technical isssues, a Logitech G35 will lead to the game not starting, on some rigs you will have to start in windowed mode so it starts. They are working on it and for me it works fine after unplugging my G35.

How does the soul-swapping mechanic work if all the clones move when you do? Does it only control which copy gets to make more clones? Or is there something else which only the "primary" you does?

The "primary" gets two privileges:(1) The ability to make more clones(2) You game-over when it dies

Don't worry about the game-overs though since it just restarts you from the last checkpoint, which is basically at the start of every room.

I played this game last weekend and it blew my mind. I disagree with the reviewer about the Metroidvania-style map: I think it's great for the immersiveness, and you can still take the long-distance teleporters to get around places quickly in the later stages when things are pretty spread out.

My complaints are rather minor:(1) You can't manually save and restore from certain points, for example, to see an alternate ending (after you beat the game, "continue" just takes you to the credits until you start over)(2) Windows-only even though it uses OpenGL(3) On my somewhat-aged (Core 2 duo, Radeon HD2500) Windows PC, there's a lot of input latency, which means that some of the twitchier puzzle solutions are pretty hard even after you figure out how they're supposed to be done. I get the impression that this is better if you're on a more powerful PC, but still a disappointment.

Still, it's an excellent game in basically every way -- story, atmosphere, music, graphics, and certainly gameplay -- and one I'd gladly play again someday.